Why video content is the future of digital marketing

It’s quite fair to say that video is the future of digital marketing. Video is everywhere, and it’s only going to keep growing, with fifty percent of all mobile web traffic now being video.

Most of the major social networks, including Facebook and Twitter, have made major shifts towards the hosting and sharing of video on their websites. Users have also started shifting more and more time towards watching video over reading articles, with over 50% of people in the US watching videos on YouTube every day.

But this shift isn’t just due to social networks and their users – over time, video content has proven to be a very effective tool for brands, no matter what their objective.

How video can help your brand

If you’re looking to increase revenue or boost sales, according to ComScore, consumers are more likely to convert from video content than other media. In the best cases, the increase in conversions was as high as 64%.

Video is also a huge help when it comes to SEO, with Google heavily favouring videos and sites with video embedded video content. This means that 70% of the top 100 search results on Google are videos, and that’s made all the more compelling when you consider Moovly’s impressive figures: your site is 53% more likely to appear on Google first if there’s a video embedded on the page.

Thanks to its use of both sight and sound, video is also highly effective at creating a connection with audiences. Video’s use of image and sound can be particularly helpful in evoking an emotional reaction and, in doing so, brands have the ability to further increase recognition and loyalty.

And all those social networks shifting to video? Well, they each provide a deep set of video analytics that you’ll be able to use to get to know your audience better. It also means your customers can become your biggest advocates, with 76% of users saying they’d share a branded video if they enjoyed the content.

Making the right content for your audience

So, you’re sold on video, but don’t know how to go about it. Here’s a quick look at how a few brands are doing it right.

Social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all now support video, however with crowded newsfeeds and features like auto-play, videos have to catch the eye of a user almost instantly. That’s why a lot of best content on these platforms is very short.

AirBNB’s #livethere content on Instagram is four seconds long, but gets its message across highly effectively. It shows a quick clip of somewhere beautiful and challenges its followers to live there.

Meanwhile, on Facebook, Buzzfeed’s Tasty page provides users with roughly one-minute long cooking how-to’s whose opening seconds get right into the cooking, with no time wasted on an intro. This strategy has proved highly successful, and the page now has just short of 80 million followers.

Of course, there’s also a place for longer content, and that is, without a doubt, YouTube. The site has tweaked its algorithms to favour promoting videos with longer watch-times (rather than higher view counts). As a result, it’s a great place for brands to drop content that comes in at a few minutes, rather than a few seconds. A recent hit in this category was H&M’s “Come Together” short by Wes Anderson.

There’s also a cheaper alternative to producing full-blown live-action video, and that’s animated explainer videos. These can basically serve as a video infographic that tells a viewer all about what your business is about, different functions of your brand or the benefits of a product. Vox, on YouTube, have a huge library of animated explainer videos that could serve as inspiration.

In the end, there are any number of ways you could go about crafting your video content – the key is finding the right fit for you.